Hints, Answers And Walkthrough For Tuesday, March 31

April is almost hear, dearest Pipsqueaks. Today’s is the last Pips of March. “The Pips of March” sounds a bit like “The Ides of March” though a little less ominous. “Beware the Pips of March!” doesn’t have quite the same dire tone — though we certainly had some tough Pips puzzles this past month. Let’s solve today’s!

Looking for Monday’s Pips? Read our guide right here.

How To Play Pips

In Pips, you have a grid of multicolored boxes. Each colored area represents a different “condition” that you have to achieve. You have a select number of dominoes that you have to spend filling in the grid. You must use every domino and achieve every condition properly to win. There are Easy, Medium and Difficult tiers.

Here’s an example of a difficult tier Pips:

As you can see, the grid has a bunch of symbols and numbers with each color. On the far left, the three purple squares must not equal one another (hence the equal sign crossed out). The two pink squares next to that must equal a total of 0. The zig-zagging blue squares all must equal one another. You click on dominoes to rotate them, and will need to since they have to be rotated to fit where they belong.

Not shown on this grid are other conditions, such as “less than” or “greater than.” If there are multiple tiles with > or < signs, the total of those tiles must be greater or less than the listed number. It varies by grid. Blank spaces can have anything. The various possible conditions are:

• = All pips must equal one another in this group.
• ≠ All pips must not equal one another in this group.
• > The pip in this tile (or tiles) must be greater than the listed number.
• < The pip in this tile must be less than the listed number.
• An exact number (like 6) The pip must equal this exact number.
• Tiles with no conditions can be anything.

In order to win, you have to use up all your dominoes by filling in all the squares, making sure to fit each condition. Sometimes there’s only one way to solve the puzzle. Other times, there can be two or more different solutions. Play today’s Pips puzzle here.

Today’s Pips Solutions And Walkthrough

Below are the solutions for the Easy and Medium tier Pips. After that, I’ll walk you through the Hard puzzle. Spoilers ahead.

Today’s Easy Pips

Today’s Medium Pips

Hard Pips Walkthrough And Solution

Here’s today’s Hard Pips:

We’ve had some similar Pips to this one in the past, but not quite like this. I’m thinking of those rectangular Hard Pips where every tile is a different total and free tiles tend to be all the same number as well. Today’s follows kind of a similar pattern but not quite, with lots of doubles and no free tiles at all. The strategy here is identifying what the odd number out is once again. None of the tiles have the number 2, for instance, and we have five 2’s. It just so happens that Pink 10 has five tiles and 5 x 2 = 10. That’s where we’ll begin.

Step 1

Place the 1/2 domino from Purple 1 on the left into Pink 10. Place the 5/2 domino beneath that from Blue 8 into Pink 10. The 4/2 domino goes from Dark Blue 8 into Pink 10 and the 0/2 domino goes from Purple 0 into Pink 10. Next, place the 3/2 domino from Dark Blue 3 into Pink 10. We have used all of our 2’s up, and this will greatly aid us in placing everything else.

Step 2

Place the 3/1 domino from Blue 8 in the bottom left corner into Orange 1. The 4/5 domino goes from Dark Blue 8 at the bottom over into Green 10. The 5/0 domino goes from Green 10 up into Purple 0 and the 0/3 domino goes from Purple 0 up into Green 3. Finish up Step 2 with the 4/0 domino from Orange 8 over to Dark Blue 0.

Solution

Place the 1/4 domino from Dark Blue 1 in the top right corner over into Orange 8. The 3/5 domino goes from Blue 3 into Pink 10 and the 5/1 domino goes from Pink 10 into Purple 1 on the top left corner. Place the 4/3 domino below that from Green 4 into Purple 3 and the 0/1 domino from Dark Blue 0 down into Blue 1 in the middle of the rectangle. That’s it! You’re done!

This was a tough one at first. I tried going in from one corner and ended up so close but so far away. It wasn’t until I realized that Pink 10 worked by using all the 2’s that I cracked this one.

How’d you do on today’s Pips? Let me know!

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